


Truth, And All Its Consequences

by Kagedtiger



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Hannigram - Freeform, M/M, Season Finale Reaction Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-09 22:44:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2000754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kagedtiger/pseuds/Kagedtiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Formerly posted on Tumblr under the title "Scars.") Will deals with the emotional fallout from Hannibal's departure. Basically guilt-porn written to cope with the season 2 finale. Character death warning-ish, I guess, based on possible outcomes of said finale. Light Hannigram.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truth, And All Its Consequences

Will is bone tired. Work was long, unusually difficult today - a combination of stubborn gears, trouble ordering parts, and the ever-present tedium of actually having to deal with the people who had hired him to fix their unnecessarily-expensive boat. Apparently nothing invites rudeness from people like when they want you to perform a service for them. Just one of those days where everything weighs you down, drags on every limb like an anchor.

The moment he opens the front door, however, he can feel the tension begin to melt out of him. The smell that lingers in the air is divine - sizzling meat and steaming vegetables and something heavy, like cream. He closes his eyes and breathes it in deeply. He can taste it in the back of his throat, feels the particles of scent travel into him and through him and carry the stress out of his body.

He makes his way to the kitchen, where Hannibal stands behind the counter in his usual apron. Summer sun from the Italian evening filters in through the large panel windows, lighting everything a hazy gold. Hannibal looks up when he enters, favoring him with a minute smile before returning to his preparations. From the other side of the island counter, Abigail turns to him on her stool and smiles. “Welcome home,” she says.

“Thanks,” says Will, and means it. He grabs her shoulders in a one-armed hug and kisses her temple lightly. “How were your classes?” he asks as he makes his way around the counter.

Hannibal lifts his head long enough to receive the light peck on the lips that Will bestows on him before returning his attention to the vegetables he’s chopping with ease and precision. Will remains behind him for a moment, forehead resting between Hannibal’s shoulderblades, hands resting loosely on Hannibal’s hips, drawing comfort from the warmth of his back.

“It was fine.” Abigail shrugs. “Except I think my European History professor is more interested in ranting about his politics than actually teaching us anything.” She rolls her eyes. “It’s a pre-req for a bunch of other stuff though, so I pretty much have to take it, and this is the only semester where it would fit.”

Will comes back around the counter to take the stool next to her, dropping his tool-bag on the floor beside the chair. “Sorry to hear that,” he offers with a weary smile.

“You look tired, Will” Hannibal notes. “Why don’t you go wash up before dinner? We’ll be eating soon.”

“What are we having?” Will peers over the edge of the counter to the stovetop next to Hannibal’s cutting board, trying to get a glimpse of the pan currently on heat.

“My heart,” says Hannibal matter-of-factly.

Surprised, Will looks up at Hannibal only to find that yes - Hannibal’s chest is a giant, gaping wound, open and bleeding. Will can see the edges of his ribs through the hole. His white apron is stained red in blotches, absorbing the blood in great swathes like crimson flowers. In the pan on the stove, his still-beating heart is wreathed in flames, bright and menacing.

Hannibal holds out a fork with a bit of charred meat on the end. “Would you like to try a taste?” he offers.

Will opens his mouth so that Hannibal can pop the morsel past his lips. It’s bitter with the taste of blood. He chews it and swallows, Hannibal smiling at him the entire time. When it reaches his stomach however, Will can feel the piece of heart begin to beat. It writhes in him, cutting him, tearing apart his guts from the inside, and Will realizes it was not a piece of heart Hannibal had him swallow, but a knife. He can feel the glint of the blade inside him.

Will opens his eyes, waking.

His scar hurts. He’s covered in sweat - nothing new for waking up in the middle of the night. He throws off his soaked blankets and makes his way into the bathroom where there’s a full-body mirror.

When he lifts his shirt, the scar looks no different than it did when he checked it before bed. The stitches are large, heavy black lines across his skin, surrounded by purple-yellow bruising that is only now beginning to fade. The cut is massive - nearly ten inches across, and yet it still seems ridiculously small to Will. So tiny for something through which his life gushed out of him like a stream. Too little to house the magnitude of the betrayal that it represents.

Will sighs and lowers his shirt, leaning his head against the cool glass of the mirror. His abdomen throbs with pain. It does that, from time to time. The doctor says Will is still healing. Will’s not sure that’s really true. His flesh might close, might knit back together, but he’s not sure he’ll ever really heal. He takes a shuddery breath, watches it fog against the glass.

He made a choice, he reminds himself. He decided that he couldn’t have love without morality. He had decided that justice was more important than happiness. But of course he hadn’t had the chance to weigh any of it against the idea of family.

He squeezes his eyes shut, willing himself not to break down. He would almost welcome the nightmares back at this point. He would take the darkness and the horror over the other visions that have come to haunt him lately.

Domestic scenes, bright light and love and family, are what pursue him now. The promise of what could have been, what he never realized was at stake until it was too late. He wants to be sure, wants to know in his heart that he made the right choice. Yet every time he closes his eyes he sees himself and Hannibal and Abigail. Family. Happy. And every time it rips at the muscle of his heart, torturing him with shattered might-have-been futures.

Will wonders what Hannibal is doing now. He wonders if Hannibal is keeping track of his victims.

Alana was the first to die. She’d passed into a coma from the shock of the fall, and died soon after reaching the hospital. Jack’s coma still clings to him, keeping him pulled under. He has yet to wake, but Will thinks he will. Jack is a fighter. Jack will struggle his way back to himself.

Abigail, the doctors tell him, has been showing signs of wakefulness. She had a few lucid moments today, brief periods of awareness between actual, healthy sleep, rather than the coma she too has been in since the attack. Will intends to visit her tomorrow, hopes he’ll be able to speak with her, and the stress of it is weighing on him.

He knows he won’t be able to get back to sleep, so he wanders the house instead, feeling like a ghost in his own home. He moves to his work-bench, thinking of tying some flies, but he remembers Hannibal framing him with them - and then proving his innocence the same way, and he steers clear. He’s hungry, but he knows he won’t be able to eat. Eating has been difficult since the attack, and not just because he’d been gutted.

Everything is tainted by Hannibal. Even the places that used to be safe are spoiled because he told Hannibal about their safety, explained what made them private and special. He’d shared everything with Hannibal, and now there is nothing left un-stained.

He opts to take a walk, finally, taking his jacket with him. It’s spring, but the nights are still frost-bitten. He shivers on the porch and watches the way his breath puffs into the night air. The cold darkness bites into his lungs.

He walks. He walks, and walks, until his legs ache with complaining muscles. He walks despite his body’s constant reminder that he is still healing, that he must use his energy sparingly. He walks until he can’t, until he has to slide his back down the rough bark of a tree, sitting on the grass already wet with pre-dawn dew, dampening his pants and most likely getting grass stains on them. Hannibal would be appalled, probably. Will is no longer keeping up the appearance of caring for his own aesthetics anymore, though. He has no one to keep up appearances to.

It’s 8 AM when he heads to the hospital. Visiting hours don’t technically start until 9, but he figures a cup of shitty hospital coffee in the cafeteria is better than pacing his living-room back home. It is, but not by much - Will can manage only a few sips before throwing the rest away.

The nurse at the front desk is sympathetic - she saw him come into the ER the night of the attack, she knows what all he lost. It makes Will uncomfortable to have a stranger look at him with such pity in her face, but he tolerates it because she lets him in at 8:55, and doesn’t make a fuss about it. He gives her a grateful nod, avoiding eye contact, and treads the familiar path to Abigail’s room.

She’s still asleep when he gets there, but he takes up his customary vigil by her bedside anyway. He thinks about Alana, thinks about her reading to Abigail the last time Abigail was in the hospital like this. He wonders if he should try to read to her too, but he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have any books that would appeal to a young woman like Abigail. He doesn’t have much that isn’t engine manuals or guides to North American fish.

He retreats to his stream to pass the time and calm himself, or at least he tries to. Hannibal knew about this place, too, tried to use it against him as he was dying. That taints it, but Will doesn’t know where else to go.

The edges of the stream are blood-red now, color frothing at the banks but not reaching the center of the current. Will tries to cast his line into the clear heart of the river, afraid of what he might catch along the blood-tinted edges.

Sometimes he sees the Wendigo on the banks, staring at him with empty, dead eyes. Sometimes he sees Hannibal, eyes full of hurt and betrayal. Today there is no one, but he can hear whispered voices in the wind through the trees:  _Did you think you could change me?_

_I did change you. I proved you had a heart. I proved it to you, by breaking it._

“What are you doing here?”

The voice snaps Will back into reality, the whispered wind leaving him with a hiss. Abigail is awake, her eyes boring into him. Once again he faces her with her neck bandaged, wounded by the love her parents tried to give her.

“Abigail,” says Will, standing.

“I don’t want to see you,” says Abigail roughly. Her voice is tired and strained, frayed at the edges.

Will feels her anger like another knife in the gut. He opens his mouth, but he can only stare, shamefaced, at the blankets over her knees. He hears the tell-tale shuddering choke of held-back sobs, and her pain aches in his own chest.

“You ruined everything!” Her voice is too wrecked to yell, but the harsh and ragged whisper is almost worse. “We could have been a family! He wanted us all to leave together. We had everything planned, everything was perfect. But you didn’t want that. You just wanted to turn him in. He tried to kill me because of you!”

Will swallows, trying to think of anything he can say to her. Her words are careless daggers, and he is already wounded. He can’t handle much more emotional blood-loss.

“He was killing people, Abigail. I couldn’t just let that go. I couldn’t just let him get away with everything he had done. He killed Beverly. He killed- what he did to you…”

“He didn’t kill me,” Abigail reminds him. “Not the first time. He couldn’t, because he said you two were my fathers. You would protect me. Family protects each other, he said. But you wouldn’t protect him, would you?”

The wound in Will’s belly throbs. He thinks he might throw up. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I did what I had to do. There… maybe there was no other way it could have ended. Maybe this was how it all had to happen.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Abigail bites, bitter.

Retreat is Will’s only option. He can’t make himself endure Abigail’s disappointment, not when he already has so many doubts about himself.

“You know my number if you need to call me,” Will mutters. He has to at least make the offer. “Or, or the nurses know how to contact me. Anything you need, just… anything.” He trails off lamely and leaves with stiff limbs. His guilt follows him out, a living thing with needle-sharp claws. 

He needs to talk to someone. The urge is new - he never used to desire company. Never wanted someone to unburden himself to. That was before Doctor Lecter. Now he seeks a compassionate ear as though it were a security blanket. Hannibal has trained him, trained Will to confide in him, bond with him. Without Hannibal, Will is a loose end, torn and flapping uselessly in the wind like an old tarp.

His mind offers alternatives that are nothing but gut-punches. Jack. Still in a coma. Alana. Gone. Even Beverly, his confidant at the FBI, is out of reach thanks to Hannibal. His efforts at fostering co-dependency have been far too successful, and Will is uncomfortably aware of how alone he is, how desperately he misses Hannibal’s voice at this very moment.

He ends up, somehow, in front of the Verger mansion. The staff don’t want to let him in at first. Will knows how he must look - crazy, homeless, dangerous even. But he is quietly persistent, and eventually they bring Margot out to ID him. She looks at him with sympathy, just like the nurse at the hospital - he’s been getting more and more of those looks lately, since Freddie’s articles have started coming out. (To be fair, Will came out as far more of a compassionate figure than he had expected in Freddie’s accounts, not that that was a very high bar. He supposes it’s her way of repaying him for saving her life from Hannibal.) Nevertheless, she lets him in and Will finds himself in a deep, rich armchair in her lavish drawing room, glass of whiskey in hand.

“I never expected to be this lonely,” he admits. “I don’t know what to do with myself.”

 Margot shrugs, and Will reminds himself that she’s not a therapist. She’s not trained to deal with problems like him, and he needs to tread lightly with her to not upset what passes for friendship between them.

“I just… I keep dreaming about him.” Will is rambling, but he has to tell someone. He can’t keep re-treading this ground in his own head over and over. “I broke his heart, and I can’t stand it.”

“Are you sure he had one?” Margot asks skeptically.

Will swallows. In his mind he hears Hannibal’s voice.  _I gave you a rare gift. And you didn’t want it._

_Didn’t I? Wasn’t it the thing I wanted most, more than anything in the world?_

_Obviously not more than the truth._

“He has one,” Will says. “I felt it break against me. I held it in my hands, knowing I could destroy it, and I was careless with it. I can’t… I can’t breathe for the guilt sometimes. He couldn’t reach out to anyone but me, and I knew that, and I used it against him. Just like he did with me.”

“Will.” Margot’s voice is sharp enough to make him look up. “Don’t let your empathy get the better of you here. You may have manipulated him, but he was a monster.” She takes a sip of her whiskey. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful, and all, for what you did for my brother,” she says it so easily, so matter-of-fact, “but he framed you for murder. He was your therapist, and he took advantage of you to put you in prison. You’re really stretching it if you think he deserved anything less than revenge from you. You did the right thing.”

Will clenches his teeth. Freddie’s facts, for the most part; he’s told Margot almost no details about his relationship with Doctor Lecter. But she’s sharp - what she didn’t glean from TattleCrime, she pieced together on her own. Somehow though, even knowing that she’s in a better position than most to judge Hannibal, he still can’t bring himself to accept her conclusions.

“He was like me,” he whispers. “He was the only person like me, or… he was the only person who understood me. And I was the only one who understood him. And now we both have to live without that. It doesn’t seem fair.”

Margot is silent for a long moment, sipping her whiskey. Her gaze is evaluating, and Will waits for her judgement like an execution. Her voice, when it comes, is much softer than he expected. “You really miss him, huh?”

Will nods. “I’ve never been as close to another human being as I was with him. I don’t think he has either.”

“That’s fucked up,” Margot observes, drawing a harsh laugh from Will.

“It is, isn’t it?” Will sighs and leans back in the armchair. The whiskey burns pleasantly in his throat. Will’s fingers absently trace the scar through his shirt. He has it covered in a bandage to keep the stitches from rubbing against his shirt when he walks, but he knows the shape of it by heart, its contours and ragged edges.

Part of him wants to rip the bandage off and re-open the wound; cut the stitches and just let the blood flow and flow, as Hannibal intended. Hannibal wanted him to have this wound. It seems wrong to try to close it, to try to heal. Another small betrayal.

“Take it from me,” says Margot after another swallow from her glass. “It’s entirely possible to love someone and hate them at the same time. But the amount that you care about them - any affection you might have - doesn’t fix the hate. It doesn’t make the horrible things they did less horrible. It doesn’t somehow erase all the terrible parts.”

“By that logic though, the terrible parts also don’t erase the reasons you love them,” Will observes.

“Mm,” says Margot. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

Will raises his glass to her in a vaguely mocking toast to the sentiment.

It’s evening by the time Will gets home, and he almost misses the phone - it’s on the third ring by the time the front door slams shut, and Will gets to it just as it’s finishing up its fourth.

“Hello?” He’s breathless when he picks up the receiver, thinking it might be the hospital calling to tell him that Jack’s awake, or maybe even that Abigail has changed her mind about speaking to him.

“Hello Will.”

Will is suddenly dizzy. He has to sit down - flops heavily into a nearby chair. It’s unbelievably dangerous for Hannibal to call him, but he has to know that Will won’t have any equipment set up to trace a call to his home line; not this soon. And that’s assuming that anyone even expected the doctor to call, which they certainly didn’t.

Will says nothing, but he knows Hannibal can hear his torn and ragged breathing across the line.

“Have you forgiven me?” Hannibal asks, his tone light and conversational, as though asking Will how his day was.

“Is this an apology?” Will manages, voice thin and not nearly as sarcastic as he would like it to be. The bitterness he feels is real, but his shock has blanched it pale for the moment. His scar throbs. The pain is nauseating.

“No.”

“No.” Will repeats in answer. “I haven’t.”

“If this were an apology, would that change your answer?”

In his tattered guts, Will knows the truth. “No.” He takes a deep breath. “I will catch you, you know. I have to, now.”

“I would expect no less from you than such an attempt,” says Hannibal calmly. “I will not be so easily found.”

“You forget that I know you,” Will growls. “You let me in. I can still feel you, in my mind.”

“And you betrayed me,” Hannibal notes. For the first time in the conversation, Will hears his tone darken, a scowl like a thunderstorm in his voice. “You betrayed my trust.”

“No…” Will takes another deep breath. Lets it out in a shuddery sigh. “You think I didn’t want the gift you offered me, but you’re wrong. I felt just as strongly as you did. But I am not the person you thought I was, and I’m only too aware of the inevitable outcome that dictates. You want me to be a killer. I’m not. Even if you would still offer that gift to me like this, someone like you and someone like me…”

“Who I am is not compatible with who you are?” Hannibal mocks. “I believe Alana told you the same, did she not?”

“She’s dead,” Will grits through clenched teeth, in case Hannibal does not yet know.

But Hannibal ignores this information. Maybe he knew enough from seeing her injuries when he’d left to be certain of it. Maybe he’s not surprised. Or maybe he just honestly doesn’t care. “If we are not compatible, then perhaps you are doomed to be forever alone after all.”

“Only as much as you are,” Will reminds him.

“You will not bear it as well. Your empathy creates a desire for human companionship, a need to be understood by others, and to feel close to them.”

Will stares out through the window, clutching the phone so tight his fingers are starting to stiffen. The dogs nuzzle around him, but quietly - they seem expectant, as though they can feel the tension in the air.

“I changed you,” Will whispers. “Don’t forget that. You say I need companionship, but you needed mine too. You need that understanding just as much as I do. We’re never really going to get away from each other now. Not until one of us is dead. Maybe not even then.”

“Some comfort, perhaps,” says Hannibal, but he doesn’t specify if he means comforting to himself or to Will. Maybe both.

“You left a scar,” Will murmurs, like a confession.

“So did you,” says Hannibal just as quietly.

For a long moment there is silence between them. Then finally Hannibal says, “Goodnight, Will.”

“Goodnight, Doctor Lecter.”

A click, and the phone goes dead. Will places it gently back in its cradle. He sits in the chair a long time, fingers absently tracing the gashed wound on his belly over and over and over.


End file.
